07.10.16 – This week, the world’s first Cybathlon will take place in Zurich, Switzerland and today we present to you the second of the NCCR Robotics teams to be taking part in the competition, LeMano. The Cybathlon is the brainchild of NCCR Robotics co-director and ETH Zurich professor Robert Riener, and is designed to facilitate discussion between academics, industry …

The next Swiss Robotics Industry Day will take place on November 1st, 2018 at the Swiss Tech Convention Centre, in Lausanne. All information on the event can be found here: http://swissroboticsindustry.ch

Abstract: With the advent of information and communication technologies (ICT), the cost effective, robust and accurate sensors are becoming important elements of internet of things (IoT). Polymeric composite sensors that...

The performance of modern legged robots still pales in comparison to their biological counterparts in terms of speed, robustness, versatility, and efficiency. The technical challenges that fuel this gap touch...

Research at CMU’s Legged Systems Group Prof. Harmut Geyer, Carnegie Mellon University https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hgeyer/ Abstract: Research at CMU’s legged systems group focuses on three questions: What are the principles of legged...

This article presents a learning activity and its user study involving the Cellulo platform, a novel versatile robotic tool designed for education. In order to show the potential of Cellulo in the classroom as part of standard curricular activities, we designed a learning activity called Windfield that aims to teach the atmospheric formation mechanism of wind to early middle school children. The activity involves a didactic sequence, introducing the Cellulo robots as hot air balloons and enabling children to feel the wind force through haptic feedback. We present a user study, designed in the form of a real hour-long lesson, conducted with 24 children in 8 groups who had no prior knowledge in the subject. Collaborative metrics within groups and individual performances about the learning of key concepts were measured with only the hardware and software integrated in the platform in a completely automated manner. The results show that almost all participants showed learning of symmetric aspects of wind formation while about half showed learning of asymmetric vectorial aspects that are more complex.

While robots have been popular as a tool for STEM teaching, the use of robots in other learning scenarios is novel. The field of HRI has started to report on how to make effective robots usable in educational contexts. However, many chal- lenges remain. For instance, which interaction strategies aid learning, and which hamper learning? How can we deal with the current technical limitations of robots? Answering these and other questions requires a multidisciplinary effort, inclu- ding contributions from pedagogy, developmental psychology, (computational) linguistics, artificial intelligence and HRI, among others. This abstract provides a brief overview of the current state-of-the-art in social robots designed for learning and describes the aims of the Robots for Learning (R4L) workshop in bringing together a multidisciplinary audience for furthering the development of market-ready educational robots.

While robots have been popular as a tool for STEM teaching, the use of robots in other learning scenarios is novel. The field of HRI has started to report on how to make effective robots usable in educational contexts. However, many challenges remain. For instance, which interaction strategies aid learning, and which hamper learning? How can we deal with the current technical limitations of robots? Answering these and other questions requires a multidisciplinary effort, including contributions from pedagogy, developmental psychology, (computational) linguistics, artificial intelligence and HRI, among others. This abstract provides a brief overview of the current state-of-the-art in social robots designed for learning and describes the aims of the Robots for Learning (R4L) workshop in bringing together a multidisciplinary audience for furthering the development of market-ready educational robots.